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Many people have heard of Perl 6, especially in the greater Perl community. However, Perl 6 has a complicated ecosystem which can be a littled daunting, so as a newcomer to the Perl 6 community myself, I thought I would share what I’ve learned.

How do I install Perl 6?

It’s simple; you can just download one of the existing implementations of the language (as Perl 6 is a specification), build it, and install it! There are several implementations out there right now, in various states of completion. Rakudo is an implementation that targets Parrot, and is the implementation that I will discuss most in this post. Niecza is another implementation that targets the CLR (the .NET runtime). For more information on these implementations and on other implementations, please see Perl 6 Compilers. Perl 6 is an ever-evolving language, and any compiler that passes the official test suite can be considered a Perl 6 implementation.

You mentioned “Parrot”; what’s that?

Parrot is a virtual machine that is designed to run dynamically typed languages. Along with the virtual machine, it includes tools for generating virtual machine code from intermediate languages (named PIR and PASM), as well as a suite of tools to make writing compilers easier.

What is Rakudo written in?

Rakudo itself is written primarly in Perl 6, with some bits of C for some of the lower-level operations, like binding method arguments and adding additional opcodes to the Parrot VM. It may seem strange to implement a Perl 6 compiler in Perl 6 itself; Rakudo uses NQP for building itself.

What’s NQP?

NQP (or Not Quite Perl 6) is an implementation of Perl 6 that is focused on creating compilers for the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. It is currently focused on targetting Parrot, but in the future, it may support various compilation targets, so you will be able to use Rakudo to compile your Perl 6 programs to Parrot opcodes, a JVM class file, or perhaps Javascript so you can run it in the browser. NQP is written in NQP, and uses a pre-compiled version of NQP to compile itself.

I hope that this information was useful to you, dear reader, and that it helps to clarify the different pieces of the Perl 6 ecosystem. As I learn more about each piece, I intend to write blog posts that will hopefully help others to get started contributing to Perl 6!